Illustration Reimagined: Breathing Life into an Illustrated Menagerie Using XR Technologies

The Reflectory
University of Portsmouth 
June - Sept 2025

Illustration Reimagined explores what happens when traditional illustration meets emerging technology. Featuring 35 animal-themed prints activated by Extended Reality (XR), this exhibition invites viewers to experience hand-drawn artworks that come alive with animation, sound, and interactive digital layers.

Originally created as a city-wide scavenger hunt for the We Shine Festival of Art and Light (2022), these works have been reimagined for a gallery setting. Visitors can use their smartphones to unlock augmented elements via two dedicated apps, layering moving images and audio over static prints, or stepping into fully immersive 3D scenes.

Through this fusion of analogue and digital techniques, Nicola Hay investigates how technology reshapes illustration's role as both storytelling and sensory experience. The work also asks broader questions about authorship, authenticity, and the evolving identity of the illustrator in a rapidly changing media landscape.

Scan. Move. Listen. Explore.

This is illustration reimagined for the digital age.

Illustration Reimagined

Upcoming Exhibition;

Sequential Illustration 2024

Second year illustration student work depicting animals sequentially. See more, view videos and read about the work on the Full gallery

Sequential Illustration 2023

Second year illustration student work depicting animals sequentially. See more, view videos and read about the work on the Full gallery

New Book Published - Extending Reality

Extending Reality

By Nicola Hay

Extending Reality: A Public AR Exhibition Exploring the Boundary Between Tactile and Digital Experience - Click above for a preview for this new fully AR/XR enabled book giving an account of the Illustrated Menagerie Augmented Reality Scavenger Hunt and discussing the use of AR/XR and illustration. The full book includes all 35 artworks included in the trail and their augmented elements, artists bios and contact details and statements about the work and will be online soon. A print copy of the book will be available at the University of Portsmouth Library and in the Ministry of Books Artists Books Archive.

January update - Augmented Reality Scavenger Hunt

Oh no! There are some gaps in the scavenger hunt;

The animals which have escaped are;

Victoria Park: 

• Ringtailed Lemur

Mountbatten Centre:

• Deathwatch Beetle
• Crow

St Mary's Church:

• Gecko
• Butterflies
• Squirrel
• Kingfisher
• Tiger
• Rabbit
• Ravens
• Dragon
• Butterfly
• Armoured Insects
• Kakapo

We are planning to return these creatures to the menagerie AR as soon as possible!

We Shine Portsmouth 2022

The Scavenger hunt is on! 

Based at 3 locations; Victoria Park, St. Mary's Church and Mountbatten Centre, each part of the hunt features 11 or 12 individually illustrated animals. These COME TO LIFE when you view them using Artivive app, with animations, film and sound.

You can follow a trail with clues to each artwork showing on the digital layer of the one before in the trail. Or you can see the map* for the locations

If you view this image using Artivive it'll reveal the map.

A big thank you to everyone working on this event, and to our artists particularly whose work is featured

Meet the artists and their work HERE